1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of automatically building a customised software application for a specific type of wireless computing device. It provides a way to rapidly and efficiently deploy functionally rich network-centric applications to the largest number of wireless computing devices.
2. Definitions
The definitions used in this specification are as follows:
Mobile Telephone: A type of telephone which is connected to the telephone network via wireless technology through the air rather than through a physical wire or other physical connection or form of cable.
Mobile Phone, Phone, Mobile, Mobile Handset or Handset: A type of Mobile Telephone.
Mobile Network: A network which provides wireless connectivity for Mobile Telephones so that they can operate and provide functions such as making telephone calls or accessing network-resident data or services.
Mobile Network Operator (MNO): A company or organisation which operates a Mobile Network and the subscribers or users who use Mobile Telephones on that network.
Global Mobile Network or Mobile Phone Network: The sum of all Mobile Networks operated by Mobile Network Operators in the world.
Wireless Network: A network which provides wireless connectivity to client computing devices. Such a network includes Wi-Fi, WIMAX and the Global Mobile Network.
Server: A networked computing device which exists to provide networked application services, features and functions such as information supply, database search and transactions to one or more client computing devices which make connection to it and make requests for services from it. There are generally many clients to each server and each client is usually of a smaller size and of smaller computing capability than the server.
Services: The networked computing services, features and functions which are typically provided by a Server to one or more network connected client computing devices. Services include information supply, database search and transactions. Such services are architecturally practical to deploy centrally in the network and typically impractical to deploy on a client computer due to the client's size and power.
Client: A computing device connected to a network delivering the features and functions of a network-centric application to the user or consumer of the application. The Client typically connects to a Server and requests Services.
Network Application: A type of application or service that is network-centric, in that it is delivered by a combination of software running on a Client performing the function of the application's interface to the end user or consumer, supported and complemented by Services provided by software on a Server which are accessed by the Client over a network.
Wireless Computing Device: A type of Client which connects to the network via a Wireless Network. Such devices include Mobile Telephones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Games Consoles (e.g. Sony PSP) or other wirelessly network connected client computing devices. The type of the Wireless Computing Device is further defined by it's Manufacturer, Make, Version, Operating System, Firmware Version.
Wireless Device or Wireless Client: A type of Wireless Computing Device.
Software Application The Client software application which is to be delivered over-the-air to, or pre-installed on, the Wireless Computing Device.
Software Components Individual units of software which form the components of the Software Application which is being customised for the Wireless Computer Device and part of the Device Adaptive Architecture (DAA) software library.
Mobile Content: Digital files and data representing electronic products used by, consumed, played, viewed or rendered on Mobile Phones. Examples include ringtones/ring tunes, wallpapers/pictures, screensavers/animations, realtones/truetones, full music downloads, video, SMS & MMS alerts, mobile games, and many other current and emerging Mobile Phone consumable entertainment and information products.
Metadata: Individual items of data or collections of data, potentially hierarchically related, which describe the attributes or behaviour of Wireless Computing Devices, Wireless Networks, Software Components, Network Applications or Mobile Content.
3. Description of the Prior Art
At the time of writing there are more Mobile Telephones in the world than there are personal computers (PCs). The nature of a Mobile Telephone is that it generally spends more time switched on and in it's owner's presence than a PC. These Handsets are increasingly powerful computers with rich functions and capable hardware which, given that they are connected to the world's vast Mobile Networks and through these to the Internet, provide a very compelling platform to deliver a significant number of Network Applications to their users.
The Global Mobile Network is one of the first examples of a network where a vast number of Wireless Computing Devices with widely different operating systems and platforms are connected to the network and can deliver Network Applications. The PC dominated Internet network differs significantly from the Global Mobile Network because there are a much smaller number of Client operating systems and platform variants. Even though the Clients on the Internet are extremely powerful computing devices they are predominantly similar to each other given the dominance of a small number of operating systems from companies such as Microsoft and Apple. The effect of this is that if one builds the Client component of a Network Application for the PC Internet on just Microsoft Windows, or perhaps the next one or two most prevalent Client architectures, then one can deploy a similarly behaving Network Application across a very high percentage of existing devices and therefore have a technically and potentially commercially viable product. Moreover in the PC Internet world it is possible to target similar groups of users very effectively by choosing to build the Client part of a Network Application using a particular operating system or platform. For example if one were to build a Network Application for Financial Directors of companies the vast majority of these could be supported by building Client software compatible with Microsoft Windows.
The same is not true of the Global Mobile Network. There are very many more Wireless Client operating systems and platform variants than exist on the PC Internet. As a consequence of this and also because of the extremely fast rate of development of functional enhancements and feature additions to Mobile Phones, the devices vary a lot more in their behaviour as do the operating systems and platforms used to access and control this behaviour. In addition to this it is not feasible to identify and target a group of users by their role who use the same or very similar Wireless Devices.
Generally speaking, the more Wireless Clients a Network Application can operate on, the greater the financial opportunity for the provider of the application as more customers can be reached. For this reason it is particularly interesting to providers of such Network Applications to be able to deploy software on the most Clients possible.
Network Applications and services are commonplace in the networked PC world, and represent very big business opportunities due to the size of the Internet and thus the potential number of users. There are a small number of ways in which the software implementing the Client part of an application is currently architected. These are as follows:
1. ‘Custom Built Applications’
End user computer devices (e.g. PCs) which can act as Clients to a Network Application generally provide a platform on which software programs can be run. These platforms are typically the computer's operating system (e.g. Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Unix, etc) or a platform layer on top of the operating system which allows software programs to be run (e.g. Java). Custom Built Applications are built from software which can be run on one of these platforms. The software in the application makes calls to the platform and the platform in turn performs a service for the application (e.g. drawing a window or sending information across the network).
These platforms typically have a very rich set of features which are available to the Custom Built Application, in fact they normally offer all the features and facilities of the computer. As such Custom Built Applications can provide very rich user interfaces, wide-ranging functionality and can normally do anything that the Client is capable of Examples of such applications (though not so network focused) are the well known Microsoft Office tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Due to the dominance of PC platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, it is possible to develop a Custom Built Application and have it run successfully on many of the world's PCs. However, if the application is required to run on more than one platform a port of the application is required to that platform or if the platform is significantly different a full rewrite of the application is required. Porting and rewriting applications is a very significant and costly engineering exercise, the effort required increases with each additional feature in the application.
In summary, Custom Built Applications provide the richest possible feature set and best interface for the end user experience but these applications are only viable on a relatively small number of platforms due to the engineering effort required to port from one platform to another.
The problem with this approach is that it cannot run on a new Client platform unless the Client part of the Network Application has been fully ported to the new Client platform. This is fine in the PC world where there is little requirement to port applications and in any case there are few Client platforms and very few new Client platforms, but the Global Mobile Network presents an problem of immense complexity by comparison with its myriad existing operating systems and types of Wireless Device and a constant flow of new Client devices coming into the market at an unprecedented rate.
2. ‘World Wide Web Applications’
The World Wide Web (WWW was originally designed as a network-based inter-document referencing and navigation system which allowed users to browse between links from one document to another potentially on different machines, potentially on different sides of the world. This technology was facilitated by a standard mark-up language in which documents were written, called hyper-text mark-up language (HTML), and the HTML browser. HTML browsers are software applications which run on a user's Client displaying HTML documents and allowing navigation between documents using HTML hyper-text links.
The technology became very popular because HTML browsers were soon written for most client computers. This meant that all networked computer users had access to the same ever extending world-wide library of information and documents. It also meant that people who wished to publish information need only mark-up the document once in HTML to have it accessible by the vast majority of networked computers in the world.
As time went on, users demanded more and more from this WWW technology and many more features were added. New features included the ability to add small amounts of software embedded into the pages being displayed (applets and scripts) which in turn allowed more functional applications to be built taking advantage of more of the Client's capabilities. Other features included forms for data collection and submission across the network of data collected to software Services resident on Servers.
The end result was that quite capable Network Applications could be deployed on a WWW Server and the vast majority of the world's Client computers using browsers were able to access and operate the application. This represented an opposite extreme to the Custom Built Application in that although WWW Applications could not be used to build an application as functionality rich on the Client, it would however run on the majority of the world's PC Client computers without having to be ported to each different platform.
The compromise inherent in this type of WWW Application is that the HTML browser is the platform through which the Client part of the Network Application accesses the capabilities of the Client. However the HTML browser has access to significantly less features and commonly significantly less powerful features of the Client operating system. In consequence the range of features which can be implemented in a WWW Application are fewer and less rich than a Custom Built Application. In addition because HTML is a standard to be commonly interpreted by all HTML browsers, the features available to a WWW Application are the features which are common to all Client platforms. This presents a problem in the Wireless Mobile Network where the features of Mobile Clients are evolving so rapidly that not only are they not common but it is desirable to deploy Network Applications which use features that are not common across different Wireless Devices including the newest features.
There are methods by which WWW Applications can deploy richer features and more advanced Client specific application code, for example by embedding Microsoft ActiveX or Java code. This has the effect of making the application a combination of a WWW Application and a Custom Built Application or a WWW Application and a Write Once, Run Anywhere Application (depending on the nature of the embedded code) and have the combined issues and limitations of two of these types of application.
3. ‘Write Once, Run Anywhere Applications’
Write Once, Run Anywhere Applications are meant to provide the best features from the worlds of Custom Built Applications and WWW Applications. As their name suggests, the application is defined only once yet the same consistent and functionally rich application will run on many platforms without having to port the application. This is achieved in one of two ways:
i) ‘Virtual Machines’
A Virtual Machine is an intermediary software platform which sits on a Client's own platform (e.g. operating system) and runs the Write Once, Run Anywhere Application. This is achieved because the application software is able to be read line by line by the Virtual Machine and the instructions are interpreted on-the-fly into corresponding native calls to the Client's platform.
The end result of this approach is that if a Virtual Machine is written for every significant Client platform then one is able to develop a single computer program compatible with the Virtual Machine which can produce a user experience much functionally richer than a WWW Application (as there is access to more of the Client's platform features) without having to port the application to each Client platform. An example of this technology is Sun Microsystems Java.
The problem with this approach is that if the Client software has any internal complexity (e.g. is scientific in nature, makes use of software threads, has near-real-time graphics or any other real-time properties) then a like performance of the application becomes much more difficult to ensure across multiple different types of Clients. This is the reason that a mobile Java Game never runs on all Java Clients but only a small subset which has been specifically tested by the originator of the game to ensure that the user experience remains the same. This is why programmers often say “Write Once, Debug Everywhere”. This problem can never be obviated using the Virtual Machine technique.
ii) ‘Pseudo Code Compilers’
Pseudo Code Compilers achieve a similar outcome using a different method. Similar to Virtual Machines, the software representing the application is written once and is represented in a high level form which can be interpreted by other software. However rather than deploying a Virtual Machine platform on every target Client which interprets the application code on-the-fly, before the application code is sent to the Client a compiler reads through the application and builds (compiles) a native application which will run directly on the Client's operating system platform.
This way a single representation of a rich featured application can be developed and it can be run on any Client for which a compiler exists. An example of such a system is Sybase's PowerBuilder (which incidentally can also implement a version of the Virtual Machine architecture using it's ‘P-Code’ technology).
The problem with both these approaches are identical to that of Custom Built Applications, except that in these cases it is the compiler or the interpreter which must be re-written for every target Client platform. Similarly, that presents no great problem in the PC world where there are few operating systems but it presents an almost insurmountable hurdle in the Mobile Network world where you cannot deliver an application unless you can first deliver the compiler or the interpreter. It's an inescapable catch-22.
In summary of these three methods, PC Network Applications can be developed as:                Custom Built Applications if you want rich features and functions but only want it to run on a small number of types of Client platform, or        WWW Applications if you want to define them once, have them run everywhere but are happy to live with a limited user experience, or        Write Once, Run Anywhere Applications if you want to define them once and have them run on many platforms.        
In the world of Mobile Phones the environment is significantly different. The major differences are as follows:                There are many more Mobile Devices in use connected to many different Mobile Networks.        There are significantly more manufacturers of Mobile Phones each with potentially multiple Client platforms resulting in many more varieties of Client platforms on which applications need to run.        The capabilities of Mobile Phones change very rapidly as more and more features are added. The end result is that two different Mobile Phones can have very different capabilities, quite unlike PC Clients which tend to be very similar.        
In order to maximise the financial potential of a Network Application delivered using Mobile Phone technology the requirements are:                Enable the application to run on as many Mobile Devices as possible;        Enable the application to be rapidly commissioned onto new Phones as they are released;        Enable the application to take advantage of the best and most appropriate features of each Mobile Device, as opposed to just running the same application definition everywhere.        
Most of the world's Mobile Phones do have a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) or eXtended HTML (xHTML) browser installed. These browsers and associated document based mark-up languages are directly comparable to the architecture of the WWW Application. Using this Mobile Phone technology it is possible to develop a Network Application which will run on nearly all the world's Handsets. The problem is that, similar to the restrictions of WWW Applications, WAP & xHTML can only utilise a very small subset of each Mobile Phone's capabilities. It is not possible to develop the most functionally rich user experience using these technologies as they don't have access to the most advanced features of the Phone.
A significant proportion of Mobile Phones now come with a Client platform onto which applications can be deployed. Most significantly these include Java (or Java 2 Mobile Edition—J2ME), Symbian and Brew. Java is the most widely adopted of these technologies but, like Symbian and Brew, applications built with the technology still have serious issues and limitations. There are nearly two billion instances of thousands of different types of Phones on hundreds of different Mobile Networks. This presents the Java platform and Client application building in general with the following problems:                Different Phones have different versions of Java.        Different Phones have different Java bugs.        Different Phones have different parts of the Java platform implemented.        Every Phone has many different releases of operating system and firmware which means there are behavioural differences on Phones of the same type of a different age.        The same Phone can exist with several identities (for example, MNO branded version of Phones).        Every Phone has different physical characteristics like screen size, number of pixels, colour depth, keyboard controls, soft-key characteristics etc.        Every Phone has different computing capabilities like processor speed and memory size.        Every Phone has a different set of media files and formats that can be shown via Java (e.g. audio, pictures, video, animations, etc). Sometimes these are different from the formats that the Phone lets the user use in native Phone applications, such as setting a screen wallpaper.        Every Phone has different software limitations (two Phones may have the same amount of memory but they allow an application to use different amounts).        Every Phone has a different set of media files and formats that the Phone's operating system can handle and these are potentially different from those that can be handled by Java or the platform which runs the application on the Phone.        Phones handle their network connection in many different ways, the technologies are different, the settings are different, the user prompts are different, the way settings are sent and handled by the Phone are different, the way connections are managed can be different.        Different Phones have different networking capabilities and handling (e.g. CSD, GPRS, 2G, 2.5G, 3G, WAP, SMS, Bluetooth, Infrared, Wi-Fi, WiMAX etc)        
This means that although software language consolidation platforms like Java can be available on a very large proportion of the world's Phones and provide a useful programming language for deploying applications that can use the advanced features of a Phone to produce a rich user experience, in practice every different Phone requires a custom built application to navigate and alleviate their many differences.
There is no previously existing technology, platform or method that has ever had to meet the challenge of rapidly and efficiently delivering the most functionally rich applications to the most Wireless Computing Devices optimised for each device.
Because all Phones differ in these ways to some degree the only way to deliver an application using the most advanced features of each Phone to the most Phones is to deliver a custom built application for each different Handset. If one used a traditional approach to this problem, whichever approach was used, the net result would be an inordinate and unmanageable amount of porting. This would end up with a new “stream” of code used to build the application for each new Phone. This is very expensive and maintenance becomes more and more difficult the more streams of source code you add. The net result is that it is prohibitively expensive to build an application where the source code for the application has been tuned for each device. It's clear that a new approach is needed.